Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Battery degradation after only one month?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
1) Tesla should return calls when they say they will return calls. If they're overloaded, don't commit. (I'd be lying if I said I hadn't personally experienced some issues in this area.)

2) Even if battery inspection isn't part of annual maintenance, if you have an unusual decrease in range, it will be investigated (just like any potential warranty issue). I'd first try a slow charge at 110, and let it sit a few days (if you can bear it). (I'm definitely NOT the battery expert on this forum by a long shot, but that advice worked for me.) You may find subsequent charges are fine after that.

3) Are you within distance of a service center? I'd just stop in, ask for the manager, make an appointment in person. They're experiencing some growing pains, again, it's inexcusable you haven't heard back. So do what you need to do to get it looked at if you really believe this is an issue. For all we know, they've already pulled the logs, are analyzing -- and just doing a crummy job of communicating.

4) Can't emphasize enough that they will want your battery if it is exhibiting unusual behavior. I had a battery pack pulled for that reason. Car was running fine, charging fine, just throwing weird error messages. The battery was replaced at no charge. I didn't ask for that to be done - the replacement was their decision. (documented in a blog Roadtrip: The Rest of the Story - Blogs - Tesla Motors Club - Enthusiasts & Owners Forum)

- - - Updated - - -

I might also add that if you're going to be yelling at someone (not saying that YOU did, just anyone), make sure you're yelling at the right person. Some of Tesla folks are on the receiving end of an awful lot of unacceptable vitriol (I've heard stories that shocked me - people say some really unacceptable personally insulting things when they're not getting their way). And these are folks that don't have the responsibility for communication, etc.

All of us need to be better than that.
-end of public service announcement-
 
Well I am definitely more at ease now that they are "guaranteeing" the battery! Elon is truly a man with vision! But I still hope the service department becomes better equipped to handle customer issues soon.
 
Well I am definitely more at ease now that they are "guaranteeing" the battery! Elon is truly a man with vision!

Just don't open the battery pack to try and find the missing miles ;-)

But I still hope the service department becomes better equipped to handle customer issues soon.

I agree that they are showing growing pains in the customer service department. A live person calling you back on the phone with an short explanation on why you shouldn't worry about your observed loss of range would have made a huge difference.
 
As a reference point, after seeing 240-241 miles when new, my car, after 4 months and about 4600 miles, is at 237-238 when I check it in the morning, about 3 hours after it finishes charging. Maybe I'll spend an extra dime and set the charging to start after super-off peak ends (5AM) to see how much of that is vampire.
 
I'm at 4,000 miles and just recently dropped from hitting 240 at the end of a standard charge to now consistently stopping at 239. I've supercharged twice and never done a range charge. Took delivery back in December. At delivery I would frequently get up to 242 range on a standard charge.
 
Just under 2 months and 2700 miles, I get 242 per charge still. (finished charging a while ago so it dropped to 241...)
 

Attachments

  • uploadfromtaptalk1367025068530.jpg
    uploadfromtaptalk1367025068530.jpg
    36.3 KB · Views: 338
The OP, qphan, does have a regular fairly-deep discharge routine. His daily roundtrip is 110 miles with no charging at work, I believe.

I have an approximate 100 mile daily roundtrip myself. I have access to charging at work, but don't always use it and even starting out with a Standard charge each morning, I don't think my battery has gone below the 50% mark yet (based on how far the green bar moves). I'm around 3,000 miles and still have 239-242 miles when I go out in the morning. I think the variance is due to the vampire losses depending on how long the car sat after charging finished. Lately, in the warmer weather, I've been under 300 Wh/mi on my commute and see projected numbers actually higher than rated.
 
As I mentioned, I seem to have lost about 4 miles over 4600 miles.

I've done 3 range charges, and have Supercharged 4 times. I don't have a commute, and and typically charge, then let it drop down to between 130-200 miles before plugging in (240V 40A), which might be every 2-3 days. I believe I've only had the range below 50 miles 4 times.
 
Noticed the comments above re. "deep discharges". You'd have to go below 10-20% to call it a deep discharge. I regularly go below 20% in my LEAF, but with its limited range, it's hard for me not to! 100-150 daily miles in an 'S' will not give you a deep discharge!

As others have mentioned, do expect capacity loss to be greater up front and taper off with time. This is consistent with my LEAF experience. I'm at 33K miles, mostly up and down mountains, and after more than two years of ownership have about 8% reported loss. But then again, the LEAF has no battery thermal management and the battery degrades faster when hot. You don't have to worry about that with a Tesla.

It's not worth getting worked up over a few reported miles of loss. Give it another year or two and see how it goes. :)
 
I wonder why they display "243" miles instead of "approximately 240". 3 significant figures are more precise than accurate, and like the post of the leaf owner said, tracking a Guess o Meter obsessively can ruin your experience.

Feels like trying to guess the health of a hard drive by looking at the estimate of time left to copy a bunch of files...

If on the other hand you are a data wonk dump the API variables with weather and route info into a table and analyze away.

One could build a simple web app that gets these data dumps and over months/years calculates deviance from expected or from the herd to give you a battery pack early warning it may be fun, but im sure tesla's telemetry team does this already proactively or on demand; and has access to relevant info not exposed in the public API.




X1188. Sorry if this is terse, sent from my phone.